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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  18d ago (text post)   660 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for January 27, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Still no tinkering this week. How are you doing @Southkraut?

Lots of refactoring, a bunch of minor tweaks to UI, movement, player controls...but my main issue of last week, the no-longer-functional collisions, I have not been able to figure out. I'm slowly building up a test setup to get at it, but so far it confounds me.

Made an insole for my ski boots out of 1/4 mm closed cell foam. It was scraps given to me by a friendly bootfitter. That's going to be the testbed for my Hock-capable (hopefully!) ski boot insoles. They'll go between my 15mm intuition liner and the fischer travers cs boots that I have. After I get some custom insoles made for me (weird-shaped feet that work fine) I'll go see a bootfitter. Then the plan is to get Solarcore aerogel or something similar and really insulate my boots. Hopefully, I should then be well into double boot territory for how insulating these boots are.

If you know of any source for Solarcore or similar aerogel please let me know.

So I think I'm wrapping up my minecraft llm api project for now. I've put a bunch of work into it and I've got it doing what I wanted... you can create builds from an llm. The build system keeps track of past builds, so you can have the llm review what was done and make additions later.

I'm lacking ideas about what to do with it next. I think I need other people to give it a try so I can see what they do with it. I have a demo server up if anyone is interested. You'll need a Claude subscription or some api tokens with another llm, it's really just llm connectivity so without that it's just a Minecraft server.

I think it'd be great if I could get a streamer to play around with it. But I think it's time to go looking for a new project.

Been trying my hand at proper photo editing this week. Over Christmas I took thousands of shots in RAW format, whittled them down to a chosen hundred, and am now only starting to edit them properly. I've been taking it quite seriously, checking the histogram as I go along for dynamic range, trying to do proper colour balancing, and so on. It's quite surprising how long it takes; it's not uncommon for me to spend hours on a photo before I'm satisfied.

Here is an album of my completed photos thus far. There's not much there yet due to how time-consuming the process is; currently I have seven photos down, with ninety-three more to go.

Great locations, great photos! :o I'm tempted to experience China now. I don't like the idea of being under complete surveillance at all times, but I am a sucker for ancient history. There's something awe-inspiring about standing in the presence of something that's thousands of years old.

China is definitely one of the best places in the world for ancient history, I’ve only made one trip there and yet it already contains more than half of my favourite historical sites. And this is coming from someone who’s travelled quite abundantly. Shanxi province, in particular, is probably the part of East Asia with the most preserved history.

Though I will say if you ever go, brush up on that Mandarin Chinese, that will be an obstacle. Barely anybody speaks anything but Sinitic languages and it's likely you'll have to use a translate app at many points. Also, be flexible, be tolerant and don’t take shit too seriously. This is good advice for travelling anywhere, but China in particular has a tendency to induce culture shock.

That's the problem with places like China and Japan - they are must-visit places, but you will be very very limited in your communication with the locals if you don't speak their languages.

Out of curiosity - what are your favorite historical sites, other than the ones in China? I need to refine my travel bucket list.

So I'm making this with the disclaimer that the countries I have travelled to at this point include the following: Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Northern Italy (so, no Rome and Sicily), Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, South Korea, and Northern China. Note I cannot comment on other areas like Egypt, the UK, Spain, Greece, Southern China, Japan, India, or Cambodia.

With all that out of the way here's my list of favourite historical things I've seen (that are not in China, if you include the China ones the list becomes a good bit longer). It's a small list of favourites because I'm picky.

1: Sainte-Chapelle, France. I need to provide the disclaimer that I was not generally very impressed by Paris - it was rather chaotic and seedy, far from the romantic vibe it attempts to cultivate in tourist adverts, and I hear things have only gotten worse since I visited. But Sainte-Chapelle is the one thing in the city I really think justifies travelling there, and it does so stunningly; it's a 1238 Gothic cathedral with a lower and upper chapel, the latter of which is covered from top to toe in stained glass depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ, Ezekiel and Job, Genesis and so on. When the light hits the chapel at the right angle the interior looks positively kaleidoscopic. It's a small chapel, it's not large at all compared to many of the others in Europe, but it's so good I would say that if you travel to any historic site in Europe you should make it this one.

2: Changdeokgung Palace, South Korea. This is a rather out-of-left-field one, I don't think most people would put the Seoul palaces on the top of their list, but I would. I even prefer it to the Forbidden City, to be honest, which I don't think is a popular opinion. I went here in winter and had the palace grounds almost entirely to myself. It's an elegant, mazelike early 17th century palace painted in bright red and teal, with a throne hall that's adorned with paintings of uniquely Korean iconography such as pear blossoms and the Irworobongdo five peaks. But what really sold this one for me was the hidden garden at the back of the palace that I don't think most people ever find their way to; you have to pay an extra fee to go there, but it adds a lot of depth to the experience. It's so big it represents 60% of the palace, it's full of very naturalistic garden design and gorgeously framed pavilions and ponds, it contains what used to be the Korean royal library, and it's also full of cats (supposedly they have been there ever since a Joseon Dynasty king became an inverterate cat lover, I'm not joking). It's worth it if you can see this one off peak season, it needs to be serene.

3: Mausoleum of Emperor Khai Dinh, Vietnam. Vietnam is one of the most overstimulating and chaotic places I've been to, it is not for the faint-hearted, but it's also got some incredible things. This mausoleum is by far the youngest historical site on the list, hailing from the early 20th century during the final tumultuous years of the Nguyen Dynasty, and it was built as the tomb of an emperor who was largely a puppet of the French. But it's on here largely because its architectural style is one of the most unique things I've seen, and you will never find it anywhere else in the world. It's an eclectic East-meets-West hybrid of French and Vietnamese architecture, and it doesn't do so by mixing in French and Vietnamese-styled structures into the same complex, rather the whole mausoleum looks like a perfect midpoint between the two disparate architectural styles. It also features more modern construction techniques such as the usage of concrete and steel, and somehow makes all of it work seamlessly. Elements like neoclassical pilasters, pillars and arches sit comfortably alongside reliefs and paintings of dragons, Asian tomb statues, carved Confucian sayings and porcelain mosaics. The dragon-and-cloud mural on the ceiling of the mausoleum is a particular highlight, it's quite incredible.

If including China, include the Great Wall, Yungang Grottoes, Shuanglin Temple, and Terracotta Army. There are a few others that nearly make it but don't. For example Venice might have made it on here, but ultimately I thought it was too touristy and shoulder-to-shoulder crowded for me to be able to truthfully say that it was experientially special for me. It was very beautiful but it also felt like being in an ant farm, which degraded the experience. I would still say to visit because it's Venice, you have to, but it still won't be on the list.

I'll end this with another disclaimer - other people probably won't agree with my list and this kind of thing is obviously rather subjective. Ultimately the best way to refine your travel list is to just research a lot.

I'll end this with another disclaimer - other people probably won't agree with my list and this kind of thing is obviously rather subjective. Ultimately the best way to refine your travel list is to just research a lot.

Yes, of course. You seemed to have somewhat similar tastes to my own, if your photos are indicative. So getting the what and why of your favorites is useful to me. Thanks. :)

Speaking of research - did you find any unusually good sources on YT or otherwise that show off historical sites, ancient wonders etc? Or give solid honest advice about the locations they are in?

There are country- and culture-specific ones all over the internet.

For South Korea, there's Dale's blog; he's a Korean temple-obsessed autist who provides extremely exhaustive coverage of temples in South Korea, there are hundreds upon hundreds of posts where he talks about their history, provides photographs and rates them on a one to ten scale. He has also put together lists where he details the ones most worth visiting, such as this post and this post.

For China, Nick in China's youtube channel is a good resource. There are also twitter accounts devoted solely to cataloguing Chinese architecture, such as this one. Though researching China is not easy at all and I ended up having to go down Chinese sources sometimes - the Chinese government puts together rather exhaustive lists of culturally and historically important sites called the "Major Sites Protected for their Historical and Cultural Value at the National Level", and they're quite good. Here is the list for Shanxi province.

If you're interested in Greek and Roman sites, Scenic Routes To The Past is a good youtube channel for that. It's a travel channel run by Garret Ryan, who also runs the history channel toldinstone, and it's quite extensive in covering Greco-Roman historical buildings and remains while providing historical context.

Also, this isn't for any specific destination, but Antiokhos in the West's twitter is generally a gold mine for fascinating historical sites. And if researching for a country you’re unfamiliar with, starting with the UNESCO world heritage list is never a bad idea.

This is precisely the kind of information I need in order to do less combing through crap myself. Much appreciated. :)

Looks amazing. The photos, but also the experience.

It was exceptional. Not always an easy travel, but the immense sense of age and scale you get in China is just unparalleled anywhere else in East Asia. There's also a whole lot of culture and it's not difficult at all to find active religious and ritual practice (Yonghe Temple in particular had so many chanting monks inside its halls).

I keep meaning to write a longform post about it but just get busy and sidetracked. Someday soon, maybe.

I hope you do, it would be interesting!

I never really realized how much work goes into post-processing photos. I usually just click on my phone, upload it and forget about it. And the quality is not bad, modern phones have pretty decent software. But compared to something done by somebody who knows what they're doing, you can really see the difference.

These look really professional. I particularly like the one on the Great Wall.

Thank you, that's very flattering. The Great Wall picture is one of my favourites of the entire trip, I devoted about an entire day to getting all the colours right.

There's another photo I really want to work on involving a vendor perched on a plank on the side of the wall, far above the valley below, but I've been holding off because it'll probably involve yet another marathon editing session.

Since November, I've been sending out query letters for my novel (which originated as a project for NaNoWriMo 2024), and have yet to receive any requests from agents to see the full manuscript. Therefore, it sucks and I quit.

/s No way am I going to give up that easily. However, I do think my query letter is letting me down, and needs to be heavily reworked. Additionally, the feedback I've been getting over on /r/PubTips is that it's practically unheard of for a literary agent to take a chance on a debut novel significantly in excess of 100k words, and in my query letter I mention up front that my novel is 112k (rounding down).

This is not quite as precious and self-indulgent as it sounds: the first draft was 133k, and removing over 15% of that was no mean feat. But I'm coming round to the idea that if I want to get this thing published, I'll have to meet the agents halfway. To that end, I've commenced work on a fourth draft with the explicit goal of cutting ~12k words (more, if possible), or 11.4%. Having edited the first four chapters, I've reduced their word count by 10.6% without, I think, losing anything significant, so I think I'm on the right track. Hope I won't have to kill too many darlings.

I have made no progress on mastering "Phobophile" on the guitar. The last few days I've just been practising two-octave scales (major, harmonic minor, natural minor, Mixolydian).

After getting an offer, I elected to go the self pub route with my first story (A different story than I got the offer on actually, because I didn't feel confident finishing that series). I got what was apparently pretty decent numbers on my offer (I can look up the breakdown by medium if you want em), but even then the percentiles are kinda brutal. I think the highest was ebooks at 30 or 35 percent after platform fees. I know the sales and marketing efforts of publishing houses are supposed to be better than what most authors manage on their own, but I really did not feel comfortable signing away very fixed and definite rights and shares of profit in exchange for marketing efforts that were highly subjective and discretionary. Obviously the publisher is suppose to be aligned with your interests, because every sale benefits them even more than it does you, but I just don't love the model in this day and age where up-front printing costs have gone from 5-6 figures to basically zero. Even with audiobook production being included and a small advance (5k per book), it didn't feel worth it to me. So, I'll be self publishing my first novel in June. I wish you the best with your submissions though, it's a harsh game if you're not one of the big genres that they're currently pushing.

Thanks a lot. What platform are you using for self-publishing?

Amazon. I currently post on Royal Road/Patreon/other forum sites, but Amazon and Audible are pretty much the only games in town for self publishing unless you go full indie and sell ebooks off your own website. There are other options, but they generally don't have a fraction of the reach.

I wonder how this process actually works? It does not feel scalable. It would take a person likely a couple of days at least to go through 100k+ page text, especially if they want to pay proper attention. From what I read online, agents receive thousands submissions per year. Clearly, there must be some filters. I can guess "previously famous author" and "the guy I know or that somebody I know vouched for" are the obvious ones, but what comes next?

Most literary agencies accepting unsolicited submissions request a query letter, a synopsis (of three to five hundred words) and an excerpt. The excerpt is typically the first three chapters, first 5,000 words, first 10,000 words or similar. I have little doubt that many agents reject a work without even looking at the excerpt, because the query letter and synopsis don't strike them as compelling.

Hence, there are several filters a prospective author must pass through:

  1. The query letter. If the query letter doesn't make the book sound compelling, or doesn't make a persuasive business case that the book will be a commercial success, or makes it sound like it would be difficult to sell to a publisher (e.g. too long, too short, uncertain genre and audience), it's an automatic reject.
  2. The synopsis. If the agent is intrigued by the query letter, but the synopsis is confusing and disorganised without a clear sense of narrative progression or story structure, it's a reject.
  3. The excerpt. If the query letter tickles the agent's fancy and the synopsis sounds logical and engaging, but the first three chapters are poorly written, it's a reject.
  4. The full manuscript. If the query letter, synopsis and first three chapters are solid, the agent will request the full manuscript. But having read the full thing, they might decide it's not up to standard and pass on it.

So it's not the case that an agent has to read hundreds of full manuscripts every year, adding up to several million words. If an agent receives 500 submissions, he might only bother reading the excerpts of 50 of them (5,000 words x 50 = 250,000 words), with the rest getting rejected on the basis of a weak query or synopsis. Of the 50 excerpts he reads, he might only request 10 full manuscripts (10 x 75,000 = 750,000 words). So at most he's only reading a million words of prose a year (and he might well decide to pass halfway through the excerpt or the full manuscript). A million words of prose in one year is very doable: assuming 261 business days in a year, that's 3,831 words a day, or roughly 15 pages. Last year I read at least 9,164 pages: assuming ~250 words a page, that's 2.3 million words, and that was for pleasure, not my day job.

To add to this, most people underestimate how truly terrible most submissions are. I don't mean "Not a particularly good or interesting book," I mean "So bad that the agent can tell within the first few paragraphs that this writer is hopeless." If you get them to read three entire chapters you're ahead of the pack.

That reminds me of a time about a decade ago when a friend of mine gave me something to read. Apparently a friend of his was taking a creative writing class at a community college and asked him to read a story she wrote for an assignment, and he had no clue where to even begin so he gave it to me. I think he was expecting that I'd just proofread it or maybe give a few succinct ideas but the thing was so bad that merely marking it with a red pen would have been impossible; the whole thing required an extensive rewrite of the sort that necessitated a serious discussion with the author. I had no desire to get that involved, especially since I have no special qualifications to have such a conversation with a stranger, so I basically passed on the whole thing and never heard about it again. It was the kind of adjective-heavy creative writing that sounded like it was written in a seventh grade English class where they're specifically asked to do things like this.

I often wonder how much the "rules" of writing in an academic setting are actually making people worse writers. It always stuck me as a bit strange that none of the professional writing I read in my spare time followed the rules that English teachers insisted upon, though I never thought to question why. I understand that certain devices are the mark of immature writers, such as children, and that the first thing that needs to be done is to beat these habits out of them to at least create something presentable, but I think the teachers should at least make it clear that at a certain point the student will have a good enough command of the language to use their own judgment about certain things. I remember writing a paper for a music history class in college that was small enough that the professor met each student individually to go over the rough draft, and he asked me several times "What are you trying to say here?", and when I told him, his response was "Why didn't you just say that?"

Strunk & White's Elements of Style gets a very bad rap for this. It's considered the "bible" of proper writing by many English teachers, but they forgot that S&W were addressing college students who were absolutely hopeless at writing essays. So it beats proper grammar, punctuation, and communicative style into you, but it was never meant for creative writing.

(Knowing your S&W is good for fiction writers too, but if you treat it like a bible you'll write correctly but boringly.)

I've heard that January is a bad time to query, precisely because agents know a lot of people have just finished polishing up their NaNoWriMo novels and are sending them out. Don't know how true that is.

One of these days I will finish one of my other manuscripts. The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.

I can't imagine I'll be done with my fourth draft for at least another fortnight.

The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.

How long was it, if you don't mind my asking?

About 83,000 words.

I'm not much of a fantasy head, but are you looking for a beta reader? Or have you given up this particular project?

It's SF, actually.

Honestly, I've given up trying to find an agent or publisher with this particular book. I might try the indie publishing route someday, but I'd want more books in the pipeline to do that.

Anecdote:

  • GURPS Vehicles First Edition and Second Edition, for GURPS Third Edition, are sharply divisive books, with their complexity alienating some but appreciated by others.

  • When GURPS Fourth Edition is published, fans clamor for GURPS Vehicles Third Edition.

  • After twenty years of radio silence, the editor of GURPS finally explains that (1) GURPS Vehicles Third Edition is basically complete, but (2) the publisher has decided that the final editing of such a complicated book with such a shaky audience would not be worth the expense, so (3) the publisher has canceled the contract and returned the rights to the author, so that if he wants to he can excise the GURPS-specific material and publish it himself as a systemless vehicle-design supplement.

  • GURPS Vehicles fans ask the author about crowdfunding. He responds that he probably could get the book edited and published for 6 k$.

  • Astonished at the lowness of the price tag, various fans quickly offer a few kilodollars to the author. He responds that he is busy with another project at the moment, but in a few months he will put together a concrete plan for accepting money and finishing Definitely Not GURPS Vehicles Third Edition.

The point of this anecdote is, it would be pretty funny if this website contained enough fans of your commenting and moderation style that you could milk them for a few hundred dollars (not as months of Patreon/SubscribeStar donations, but as a lump sum) on the promise of a book from you.

Hah - it's flattering to think I have fans here, but even if so, I don't think my posts give much of a sense of how I write fiction.

Ironically enough, my only actual professional writing credits are with Steve Jackson Games. It's amazing to me they have survived all of Steve's really bad decisions. I guess Munchkin keeps them afloat.

...All responses coming to mind sound too much like glazing. I guess I'll say that I think that's extremely cool, and leave it at that.

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